Please feel free to view our Forum, but you must either LOGIN or REGISTER to join in the conversation.
I would appreciate some advice on renting when looking to buy a home, and to establish residency. My partner and I are considering moving to Setúbal, a suburb of Lisbon, and we are just beginning to try to understand the home buying process and especially what a reasonable timeline may be.
Bem vindo! Specifically, what advice are you looking for and how can we all help you? What are your plans?
@adventurefilmmaker Thank you for responding, and sorry for taking so long to reply...crazy busy at the moment in the US. I have been doing lots of research (on everything about being an expat in Portugal), however it is difficult understand quite a number of details about moving to Portugal. So as not to go crazy on you, I'll just ask a few questions. I read on the forum about bringing US appliances, and the general info says if the appliance indicates 220 it should work with just an adapter. But is that consistently true for alll 220 capable appliances which have motors? And, I would appreciate some recommendations on service providers in Portugal, specifically a lawyer, an accountant, a tax person, and an insurance agent for health insurance. Any help would be appreciated. FYI: tentatively planning on moving to Portugal the end of next year. And finally, what do you do as an "adventurefilmaker"? I have many years in video and web, generally corporate stuff, but it's alway. interesting to see what other video people are doing. Thank you, Chris
@chrisaa US motors are designed for a 60 Hz AC cycle, and European household current runs at 50 Hz. Beyond that, I don't know - probably some motors will be OK running at 83% of expected speed, others may not be as healthy that way.
Transformers should be heavy duty, not Amazon specials. You may be able to find a heavy duty step up transformer that also changes the cycle rate - sounds wacky to me, but I don't really know anything about it. In the end, we aren't bringing any AC motor stuff.
@chrisaa No problem. There are a lot of details to consider.
Most electronics have adapters that will work on 220. Most things with a motor, however, will not unless it specifically says it can function at 220 Volts, 50 Hz.
Most every service you need can be found here in the business directory (and I don't earn a commission for saying that). I have used and/or are currently using Ei! for my SEF appointment, Casa Portuguesa for finding a rental, and Serenity for health care services and insurance recommendations, all highly recommended. There are others here I plan to use in the future. Peruse these forums for further testimonials. I would start with Ei! to help you with your visa requirements and join the "Dream Team" webinars on Thursday evenings to get up-to-date info.
I am a retired travel-adventure filmmaker/speaker ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGhWFHhgGrOpvHHB4nv16jg ). I presented hundreds of live travelogue film shows at performing arts theaters, auditoriums, and community centers all over the United States and in Canada, usually as a part of a season of travel film lectures that ran alongside symphony, ballet, theater, opera series, etc. Venues included Carnegie Music Hall, The Sundome, National Geographic Society, the University of Utah, UW Madison, Illini Union, etc. This live, social, cinematic artform has now virtually disappeared unfortunately.
If there's any questions you have about the move to Portugal, I think you'll find a helpful bunch here on the forums.
@adventurefilmmaker Thanks for sharing your channel. I just subscribed and am looking forward to checking out the content.
@chrisaa In addition to the businesses @adventurefilmmaker listed which we also used here are additional ones we are using from the https://expatsportugal.com/business-directory/
Accounting: All Finance Matters | Expats Portugal
Legal: Reis & Pellicano International Lawyers | Expats Portugal
Insurance: Winsurance | Expats Portugal
We just started doing videos last year as a way to keep our families informed and document their trips here. https://www.youtube.com/@jonestravelers We hope to build out our skills in that area this year. We are retired IT workers from California and have been living in Lisbon for 15 months now.
Kind regards,
Trevor & Shannon
@chrisaa Just a comment after years of living abroad as a teacher and then with the U.S. Foreign Service: it is safer to assume most of your U.S. appliances either won't work or will blow out your lights or can be easily and inexpensively replaced in country, unless they are specifically labeled as multisystem. (Apple products do apparently work with just an adapter, though.) An iron pulls so much power that you can use it anywhere, but I would be cautious trying to adapt anything electronic. (Or ship a readily available and heavy iron.) TV systems used to be different all over as well -- and you couldn't play a European Blue-ray on a US player -- but the near-universal move to digital may have changed that.
@jeannette The electronic stuff could easily work, most will support either voltage system and be so labeled. On a desktop computer, you'd check the power supply; for a laptop, you'd look at the external charger. All of this stuff really runs on low voltage DC, so it already needs a lightweight transformer and the AC frequency (60Hz or 50hz) is kind of irrelevant.
Setúbal was high on my list when I was looking. I didn't really think of it as a suburb of Lisbon, but I guess it depends on what Setúbal - the whole district does come pretty close, if you're in Almada for example, and maybe as far as Quinta do Conde there appears to be a distinctly bedroom community thing going on. Portugal's administrative geography is a regular tiered system: there's the big city Setúbal (freguesia), its surrounding municipality Setúbal (município, concelho), and its Setúbal district, the entire peninsula. Some of the outlying freguesias will have two or more towns, like Gâmbia, Pontes & Alto da Guerra out to the east.
The home buying process is kind of different. We didn't have a real estate agent, but rather depended entirely on the seller's agent. When we bought our home in the US, we had our own agent, but she was paid from a percentage of the sale price, so to some extent she was really not ours after all; our Portuguese seller's agent on the other hand was selected by the seller but depends on his reputation to buyers, and in fact has been extremely generous with his time after the sale. At the critical legal juncture, there will be a Cartórial Notarial, another party who will make sure the contract is executed correctly. I did retain a lawyer; as it turned out he mostly got in the way, but had there been a real problem he could have been invaluable, and at worst it wasn't very expensive.
You should become acquainted with the process in terms of things like the Contrato de Promessa Compra e Venda, but also to recognize that not all of this stuff is strictly required. As for elapsed time ... we saw the property in June, and signed off in September, which I think is relatively fast, but it could have gone faster if we'd been in Portugal all the while. In general, if you can manage to establish yourself as a resident first, of course the whole home buying process goes smoother. I think we did OK, but we were stuck in the US for months because of visa limitations.
I did a lot of my shopping from my computer in the US. It's a terrible way to do it for obvious reasons, and made worse by the general reluctance of Portuguese real estate agents to specify the location of a property. That's an important feature, as I probably don't need to explain, so I spent a lot of time with google maps aerial imagery tracking these houses down.
I'm sure there are lots of bad experiences out there, particularly in more popular ex-pat destinations, but of course the same is true everywhere. If you have doubts about whether a house is sound or has real problems, it's possible to hire someone to look at it - but as far as I know, not many buyers actually do that, neither Portuguese nor foreign buyers, despite the somewhat unreliable Portuguese building practices.
@donn Thank you for the information you provided. Sorry that it took while to respond...things have been busy here in the US.
